Back at his native Breitbart News after being ousted from the West Wing, former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon is quickly ramping up his war on the political establishment that he failed to tame while he was inside the White House. And he’s not afraid to point the finger at his former boss for being co-opted by the same Republican elites that he railed against on the campaign trail. “You might call it the original sin of the administration. We embraced the establishment,” Bannon told 60 Minutes in a freewheeling interview with CBS host Charlie Rose that aired Sunday night. “I mean, we totally embraced the establishment.”

It was a necessary evil, at first, he conceded. Trump’s campaign was an “island of misfit toys,” Bannon told Rose, unready to govern. “You had to staff a government,” he continued, explaining the initial decision to forge alliances with the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “He basically says, ’I don't want to hear any more of this “drain the swamp” talk,’” Bannon said, describing McConnell’s first conversation with Trump after his inauguration. “He says, ‘I can’t hire any smart people,’ because everybody's all over him for reporting requirements and—and the pay, et cetera, and the scrutiny. You know, ‘You gotta back off that.‘ The ‘drain the swamp’ thing was—is Mitch McConnell was day one did not want to—did not want to go there.”

Trump's central challenge, according to Bannon, is to reignite the anti-establishment animal spirits, rejecting McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan and forging his own way forward. It’s a mission to which he has recommitted himself, from the outside, using his soapbox at Breitbart to crush the Republican elites that aided and abetted Trump’s rise but now seek to undermine his presidency. “The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election,” he said, speaking at a breakneck clip, condemning Ryan and McConnell for hampering what he described as Trump’s “populist, economic nationalist agenda”.

Trump has abandoned many of his populist campaign promises, it is true, but it is unclear whether the culprit is an establishment plot against the president or simply his own short attention span. Eight months into Trump’s administration, few elements of his ambitious agenda—tax reform, Obamacare repeal, infrastructure spending, building a border wall—have been accomplished, derailed both by Republican infighting and by a non-stop series of self-inflicted crises. Bannon excused some of these failures, accusing the media of holding Trump to “an unfair standard.” He also pinned some of the blame on Congress, which he said had told Trump that his West Wing should focus on Obamacare repeal first because, “Paul Ryan and these guys come in and said, “We’ve done this for seven years. We’ve voted on this 50 times. We understand this issue better than anybody. We know how to repeal and we know how to replace, and this is ours. That's what we're going to start with day one, and we will have something on your desk by Easter.‘ ”

He acknowledged, however, that Ryan’s failure to deliver was also the fault of deeper ideological divisions within the Republican Party—divisions that he and Trump cultivated on the campaign trail and brought to the surface. “There is wide discrepancy in the Republican Party, as we know today, now that we're in it. But I will tell you, leadership didn't know it at the time.”

The interview, which was conducted at Bannon’s Washington, D.C., home, which also doubles at Breitbart’s headquarters, was filmed Wednesday, the day after Trump effectively rescinded DACA, the Obama-era policy giving temporary reprieve to “Dreamers” from deportation and allowing them to work legally in the country. By announcing a six-month window before he eliminates the program, Trump once again threw the G.O.P. into turmoil, forcing congressional Republicans to confront a vexing issue that has divided the party. Trump has suggested that he would like Congress to codify DACA as law, potentially as part of a bipartisan immigration package bolstering border enforcement; Bannon told Rose that he considers anything like DACA to be “amnesty.” But the chaos Trump caused seems to dovetail with Bannon’s larger strategy, too, shaking the G.O.P. from its stupor and forcing lawmakers to make decisions they have long avoided.

Bannon, for his part, is reportedly planning to promote a host of primary challengers in 2018, potentially complicating Republican efforts to maintain control of Congress. It’s a strategic calculation for the former Goldman Sachs banker, who has devoted himself to remaking the G.O.P. in his controversial nationalist-populist vision, even if it requires destroying the party in order to save it. “They're not going to help you unless they're put on notice,” the self-described “street fighter” told Rose, promising that he would help Trump’s agenda as his “wing man” outside the White House. ”They're going to be held accountable if they do not support the President of the United States. Right now there's no accountability. They have totally—they do not support the President's program.”